The Minion is turning two next week! Can you believe it? I can’t. I really can’t.

As one does in these situations, we held a party. One can’t have a party without cake, and this time around the theme was Puffin Rock. Don’t know what that is? It’s the most adorable animated series on Netflix about a little girl puffin and her brother and all their little animal friends. The Minion loves it – we’ve watched the entire series right through twice already – so naturally that was chosen as the theme.

I thought last year’s cake was wonderful, but this time the wife outdid herself. I’ll let the pictures tell the story from here, but I’ll just add that everything was made from scratch, even the rainbow cookies (okay, so we bought some ready-made fondant icing, but when it ran out the wife quickly made some extra from scratch as well – the woman is incredible!)

Last week we had a birthday in the house, and you know what that means…CAKE!

I’ve sung the wife’s praises many times on the blog in the past, from her illustrations to the bedroom set and mobile she’d made for Elizabeth last year. And true to form, she put in a repeat performance with the Minion’s first birthday.

It reached a high point around 10PM Tuesday night, still a few inches below the bottom row of post boxes (2010 had the two bottom rows underwader, so the level was a good half-meter below the worst flood we’ve experienced here).

By the time we woke up yesterday morning the water had already begun to recede, but the view at the weir downstream was still impressive:

Measuring by how much of the tree trunks are below the waterline, I estimate the water was flowing about a meter deep over the weir. That’s a LOT of water, people!

By lunchtime yesterday, we could see the road again…well, the mud covering the road, at least. And late afternoon we had a visitor taking advantage of the temporary wetlands with an abundance of forcibly relocated crabs and frogs.

This morning the river is safely back in its channel, and all that remains is lots of mud riddled with the little scratches of crabs that woke up to find they’re not in the water any more, and that there are predators about.

As stressful as it is to see the water rising, I’m glad I got to experience this one last time before we leave. It is humbling and inspiring to see the power of nature unleashed in this way.

Thus spoke the missus as we’re strolling through a big department store during our March vacation. We had two Fuji Finepix cameras dating from the turn of the millennium which I’d inherited as my folks upgraded to DSLRs and which did their jobs well enough, but she had a point. Back when my father had bought them they were pretty nifty, but that was over a decade ago. It was time for an upgrade.